Chapter 1124 — The Passing
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Yes — how many twists and turns, how many strange and extraordinary turns of fortune, must lie between a former imperial duke, a blessed knight of the war god, a wolf general of surpassing martial power, and the man he is now: a "scholar" buried in his laboratory, unable to tear himself away from his research? And a scholar, moreover, who can churn out a full day's worth of math papers for his own daughter at the rate of thirty problems an hour — all under the fine name of "mental recreation"...
An Luo suddenly felt a chill run through her; she shivered twice without meaning to, and only then began weighing what words she could use to tell her grandfather, as briefly and plainly as possible, what had happened to her father.
"This matter... the earliest I can begin is with the blizzard at Winterwolf Keep the year Father disappeared," the young wolf general said at last, slowly, breaking the silence. "That year Father was not surrounded by the Ansul — he had run into the cultists of the Cult of the End of All Things, who were operating at the foot of the Dark Mountains..."
A warm wind blew in from the direction of the plains, stirring the lush flower fields and woods of Longbranch Manor; light danced in ripples across the pool before the main house, and blades of grass and petals, carried from who knew where, settled on the water and spun out faint rings. A maid in the manor bent down and reached for a beautiful petal that had drifted to the pool's edge, but the petal suddenly trembled and curled, as though scorched by an invisible force, and shriveled into a crinkled knot that raced away in another direction.
The maid looked up, startled and nervous, and instinctively glanced toward the main house — but found nothing.
The chirring of insects came through the open windows, and the stifling heat of a early-summer noon had begun to seep in. Pei Yi drew back the power that had slipped out by accident, and listened quietly to An Luo's account, his brow now furrowing, now smoothing, and after who knew how many rises and falls of feeling, all his thoughts and reflections finally became a long sigh.
Taken by the cultists, stripped of his faith, his flesh and soul twisted by dark sorcery, fallen into a dark sect, stained with sin and depravity, and at last turned to serve a foreign nation... Had he not heard it from An Luo's own lips, he could never have believed such things had befallen the one who was once the Empire's shining star, the son he had been proudest of.
The old duke could not keep himself from imagining — imagining what his reaction would have been had he learned of all this in his younger years, in his harsher, harder days: would he have grieved first as a father for the sufferings Bard had endured, or raged first as the Duke of Wendel for the tarnish on the family honor? He found he could imagine nothing at all. On that battlefield at Winterhold, after witnessing the deepest darkness and malice of this world, too many people had been changed forever — and among them was Pei Yi Wendel, once hailed as the "Iron Archduke."
The old duke sighed again — he felt that he had grown old after all.